Since medio August 2010 JBoss Tools 3.2 builds now provides a "Usage"
plugin which when installed and enabled will help us gather anonymous
statistics about how the JBoss Tools plugins are being used. All the
data is gathered anonymously and can at any time be disabled if you
wish.

What will we use the data for

With this enabled we can start seeing better how and where JBoss Tools
is being used; we are especially currently interested in seeing what
OS’s are being used, what screen resolution and how often users starts
their workspace.

Over time we hope to learn more to help continuously improve JBoss Tools.

How to enable/disable usage tracking

If you have the plugin installed, then on the first start of this
Eclipse a dialog will pop up asking you to send anonymous usage
statistics.

If you do not want to send anonymous usage statistics, uncheck the
checkbox and press Ok.

If you press No, no usage statistics will be collected but the
dialog will ask again on next startup.

If you just press Yes then usage statistics for JBoss Tools is
enabled.

If you later on decide to not send statistics anymore or want to
enable it, simply goto the Preferences JBoss Tools > JBoss Usage
Reporting Preferences.

How it works

When the user has enabled reporting anonymous statistics the plugin
uses Google Analytics to track data as though you visited a page under
http://jboss.org/tools/usage/.

The information collected is similar/equal to what is possible to
collect when you visit a website, including your IP address, and may
be transferred to the United States and other countries.

We do tweak a few things to track more Eclipse oriented things;
i.e. instead of Browser name we use the Eclipse product ID and instead
of Browser version we use the version of the product or if not present
the version of Eclipse core runtime plugin.

We also generate a random id for the installation so multiple startups
from the same eclipse only count as one usage.

Before March 2014 the main tracking was when a workspace starts up with
the plugin installed. Basically a ping back indicating someone started up
Eclipse with JBoss Tools installed.

Since 20th March 2014 we also started sending events when certain
features are used. Initially for things like which server type are
used, what connectors are being installed etc. To give a picture of
what features and tooling are actually being used. No personal
details are sent in these events - just ids for features used for
generating usage statistics.

If you want to inspect the source code for all of the above it can be
found
here